With the decline in hydrocarbon production from conventional resources, the focus has shifted toward producing hydrocarbons from unconventional resources. However, obtaining production from these unconventional resources is not as easy as obtaining production from conventional resources. Accordingly, the development of new technologies and methods is required to make obtaining production from unconventional resources financially feasible. Hydraulic fracturing technology has been developed to boost production from unconventional reservoirs by creating high permeability channels in the reservoir rock. This greatly improves the ability of fluids to flow toward the well and subsequently be transferred to the surface. However, the design parameters necessary for successful hydraulic fracturing are greatly affected by reservoir quality, completion scheme, wellbore properties, and other factors, many of which are not fully understood. This leads to only a few successful parameter combinations among numerous possible combinations. Considering the substantial costs associated with performing hydraulic fracturing and the critical need to enhance production, pinpointing the selection of parameters for an optimum hydraulic fracture design is crucial to having a profitable well. Clearly, it is not feasible or cost effective to field test every possible combination of fracturing parameters to find the best combinations for a particular well. Thus, more sophisticated methodologies are required to identify optimum hydraulic fracture design parameters.
Accordingly, there remains a need for improved methods, devices, and systems for optimizing wellbore completions.